‘Now,’ he said. ‘We sit here until you’ve told where you went that night. And if you lie to me I swear I’m going to come back and break your neck.’
Estabrook didn’t attempt any obfuscation. His manner was that of a man who had passed many days in terror of a sound upon his step, and was relieved now that it had come, that his caller was merely human. His egg eyes were perpetually on the verge of breaking, and his hands trembled as he flipped the pages of the gazetteer, murmuring as he did so that he was sure of nothing, but he would try to remember. Gentle didn’t press too hard, but let the man make the journey again in memory, running his finger back and forth over the map as he did so.
They’d driven through Lambeth, he said, then Kennington and Stockwell. He didn’t remember grazing Clap-ham Common, so he assumed they’d driven to the east of it, towards Streatham Hill. He remembered a church, and sought out a cross on the map that would mark the place. There were several, but only one close to the other landmark he remembered, the railway line. At this point, he said he could offer nothing more by way of directions, only a description of the place itself: the corrugated iron perimeter, the trailers, the fires.
‘You’ll find it,’ he said.
‘I’d better,’ Gentle replied.
He’d so far told Estabrook nothing about the circumstances that had brought him back here, though the man had several times asked if Judith was alive and well. Now he asked again.
‘Please tell me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been straight with you, I swear I have. Won’t you please tell me how she is?’
‘She’s alive and kicking,’ Gentle said.
‘Has she mentioned me at all? She must have done. What did she say? Did you tell her I still love her?’
‘I’m not your pimp,’ Gentle said. ‘Tell her yourself. If you can get her to talk to you.’
‘What am I going to do?’ Estabrook said. He took hold of Gentle’s arm. ‘You’re an expert with women, aren’t you? Everybody says so. What can I do to make amends?’
‘She’d probably be satisfied if you sent her your balls,’ Gentle said. ‘Anything less wouldn’t be appropriate.’
‘You think it’s funny.’
Trying to have your wife killed? No, I don’t think that’s very amusing. Changing your mind, and wanting everything lovey-dovey again: that’s hysterical.’
‘You wait till you love somebody the way I love Judith. If you’re capable of that, which I doubt. You wait until you want somebody so badly your sanity hangs on it. You’ll learn.’
Gentle didn’t rise to the remark. It was too close to his present state to be fully confessed, even to himself. But once out of the house, map in hand, he couldn’t suppress a smile of pleasure that he had a way forward. It was already getting gloomy, as the midwinter afternoon closed its fist on the city. But darkness loved lovers, even if the world no longer did.
2
At midday, with his unease of the previous night allayed not one jot, Pie’oh’pah had suggested to Theresa that they should leave the encampment. The suggestion wasn’t met with enthusiasm. The baby was sick with sniffles, and had not stopped wailing since she’d woken; the other child was feverish too. This was no time to be going away, Theresa said, even if they had somewhere to go, which they didn’t. We’ll take the trailer with us, Pie replied; we’ll just drive out of the city. To the coast, maybe, where the children would benefit from the cleaner air. Theresa liked that idea. Tomorrow, she said, or the day after, but not now.
Pie pressed the case, however, until she asked him what he was so nervous about. He had no answer to give; at least none that she’d care to hear. She understood nothing of his nature, nor questioned him about his past. He was simply a provider. Someone who put food in the mouths of her children, and his arms around her at night. But her question still hung in the air, so he answered it as best he could.
‘I’m afraid for us,’ he said.
‘It’s that old man, isn’t it?’ Theresa replied. ‘The one who came to see you? Who was he?’
‘He wanted a job doing.’
‘And you did it?’
‘No.’
‘So you think he’s going to come back?’ she said. ‘We’ll set the dogs on him.’
It was healthy to hear such plain solutions, even if -as now - they didn’t answer the problem at hand. His mystif soul was sometimes too readily drawn to the ambiguities that mirrored his true self. But she chastened him; reminded him that he’d taken a face and a function, and in this human sphere, a sex; that as far as she was concerned he belonged in the fixed world of children, dogs and orange peel. There was no room for poetry in such straitened circumstances; no time between hard dawn and uneasy dusk for the luxury of doubt or speculation.
Now another of those dusks had fallen, and Theresa was putting her cherished ones to bed in the trailer. They slept well. He had a spell that he’d kept polished from the days of his power: a way of speaking prayers into a pillow so that they’d sweeten the sleeper’s dreams. His Maestro had asked for its comfort often, and Pie used it still, two hundred years later. Even now Theresa was laying her children’s heads upon down suffused with cradlesongs, secreted there to guide them from the dark world into the bright.
The mongrel he’d met at the perimeter in the pre-dawn gloom was barking furiously, and he went out to calm it. Seeing him approach it pulled on its chain, scrabbling at the dirt to be closer to him. Its owner was a man Pie had little contact with; a short-tempered Scot who brutalized the dog when he could catch it. Pie went down on his haunches to hush the creature, for fear its din would bring its owner out from his supping. The dog obeyed, but continued to paw at Pie fretfully, clearly wanting to be loosed from its leash.
‘What’s wrong, buster?’ he said to it, scratching behind its war-torn ears. ‘Have you got a lady out there?’
He looked up towards the perimeter as he spoke, and caught the fleeting glimpse of a figure stepping into shadow behind one of the trailers. The dog had seen the interloper too. It set up a new round of barking. Pie stood up again.
‘Who’s there?’ he demanded.
A sound at the other end of the encampment claimed his attention momentarily; water splashing on the ground. No, not water. The stench that reached his nostrils was that of petrol. He looked back towards his own trailer. Theresa’s shadow was on the blind, her head bared as she turned off the night-light beside the children’s bed. The stench was coming from that direction too. He reached down and released the dog.
‘Go, boy! Go! Go!’
It ran barking at a figure slipping out through a gap in the fence. As it went Pie started towards his trailer, yelling Theresa’s name.
Behind him, somebody shouted for him to shut up out there, but the curses were unfinished, erased by the boom and bloom of fire, twin eruptions that lit the encampment from end to end. He heard Theresa scream; saw flame surge up and around his trailer. The spilled fuel was only a fuse. Before he’d covered ten yards the motherlode exploded directly under the vehicle, the force sufficient to lift it off the ground and pitch it on its side.
Pie was blown over by a solid wave of heat. By the time he’d scrabbled to his feet the trailer was a solid sheet of flame. As he pitched himself through the baking air towards the pyre he heard another sobbing cry, and realized it was his own; a sound he’d forgotten his throat could make, but which was always the same, grief on grief.
Gentle had just sighted the church which had been Esta-brook’s last landmark